The Foundling Boy

by Michel D

  A week later, Jean wrote to Joseph again.

  Dear old thing, I’m afraid from now on you’re going to have to speak to me like royalty, in the third person. I am sleeping with the patronne. To tell you the truth, it’s more the other way around. She is sleeping with me. And to be even more precise, she ravished me. I didn’t fancy her at all in the beginning … No, it’s too bad, you’ll have to hear the whole story. A couple of days ago, having scrubbed my last pan of the evening and steered the chef to his bedroom where, as usual, he flopped onto his bed without getting undressed (or even taking off his toque), I went out to the terrace to get some fresh air. The view was magnificent: the lights of Menton and Monaco, the dark mass of Cap Martin. Moonlight to boot. Leaning on the balustrade, I was musing on the idea of one day bringing here someone I like very much, a creature so perfect I just want to go on keeping the secret I’ve been keeping for the last seventeen years. Anyhow, there I am dreaming, when suddenly the patronne comes up. I thought she was going to tick me off for some pan or the state of the sink, but it was nothing like that! Wrapped in a black wool shawl, she leant her elbows on the rail next to me and said in a voice that I didn’t recognise at all:

  ‘Beautiful, isn’t it?’

  What would you have said if you’d been me? ‘Yes, Madame.’ Obviously. Well, it didn’t put her off a bit. She heaved a sigh that didn’t exactly pierce my soul, but it did put me on my guard. She was wearing perfume and didn’t smell too badly of garlic. Anyhow, I mean: she didn’t even smell of garlic at all, although there must have been a strong whiff of it coming off me.

  ‘You’re not feeling too lonely?’ she added.

  ‘Lonely? Oh no. I’m thinking about other things besides work. I’m dreaming.’

  She must have seen in me some sort of high-flown creature, a poet lost among the pans, one of those social injustices the Front Populaire has forgotten to put right. She ruffled my hair with her hand and she said, as enthusiastically as if she’d stroked my flies: ‘There’s a lot going on in there!’

  Enough! I’ll keep it brief. She talked about herself: her hard life, her depressed father, horribly disfigured by his injuries, the restaurant going downhill, her useless mother, how she’d brought it back from the brink by sheer hard work, alone, admirable, one of those orphans you see crowned with a garland of roses for her virtue. Stefano? A friend. Just a friend. He looks after her, her, the weak woman. Nothing like what mean and vulgar gossips might make it out to be (or hear from the bedroom above). Was I likely to be able to do better? I asked myself that question.

  ‘How hot it is!’ she said.

  And she opened her black shawl a little to fan herself. She was naked underneath. Dear old thing, there’s no scene of that sort in Stendhal, nothing in Byron, nothing in Maeterlinck. Where is its equivalent in literature? To cut a long story short … We go to her bedroom. The bed was ready. She makes me have a shower. Did I shine afterwards? She’ll tell you better than I can if you happen to be passing this way. In a word: I didn’t close my eyes all night. At eight in the morning she sent me to the kitchen. All day she cold-shouldered me, ignoring me. In the evening it starts all over again. Fitness comes with training. Sadly, with one dreadful consequence: when I woke up, I couldn’t manage more than 150 press-ups. Yet I can swear to our dear coach, hand on heart: there’s no emotion lurking down there …

  That’s about where I am. Your absence weighs on me. I’m badly in need of help. In a fortnight I’ll have earned the money I need to go home. But will I go home?

  The same evening Stefano’s truck stopped outside the restaurant door. The Italian jumped down, grinning, unshaven, exhausted. He had come from Venice non-stop with a load for Marseille. He swept his Mireille off her feet; she must have weighed as much as a wisp of straw in his arms. He asked for news of Jean and came to find him in the kitchen.

  ‘Hey, my frienda, you are still scrubbin’ de pans. Leave it! Eeza time to enjoy ou’selves!’

  Mireille frowned.

  ‘There’s work to do!’ she said.

  ‘No’ for friends! Andiamo, Gino!’

  Jean sat at their table, on Mireille’s left. They had dinner in the main restaurant, which was already full. Jean admired Stefano’s poise, so superior to his own, an adult and an Italian poise that did not feel out of place anywhere. This warm, powerful man longed to share his happiness. He drove like a bull for whole days and nights to be able to allow himself his stops at Roquebrune, where he opened his arms and his heart to friendship, to love. What beast would he have been transformed into if anyone had revealed to him that Jean and Mireille … But graces of state exist, if not states of grace. What was so obvious to the eyes of everyone, what made the waitresses almost unable to conceal their giggles, passed him by. He ate, drank and slid his hand under the tablecloth to stroke Mireille’s skinny thigh; she shivered as nervously as if he had crept much higher. Jean was astonished to find that he was not jealous and could quite calmly face the noisy night in his narrow bed in the pantry while Mireille and Stefano made love on the floor below. It even occurred to him, not without pleasure, that he would get a night of rest and the opportunity to resume the rhythm of his 200 press-ups, without which he could not hope to be worthy of taking up his old place at Dieppe Rowing Club. Stefano was picking his teeth with wholly Italian assiduity, leaning back in his chair and flexing his powerful wrestler’s torso. At this time of night he was friends with all the world. Mireille was still trembling. Something awaited her that she had sampled before with savage joy, but which had changed its taste over time and with Jean’s appearance. She enjoyed fresh meat, and at the same time felt panic-stricken at abandoning Jean for more violent pleasures. She laughed, embarrassed, stood up to give instructions, telephoned to make sure that the prefect would not be passing this evening, ticked off a waitress and went down to her bedroom where, tearing off her dress, she threw herself naked onto the bed to wait for her man.

  Stefano had had a carafe of grappa brought. He filled two glasses to the brim. The spirit unleashed friendly and protective feelings, and he set about demonstrating to Jean that Fascism was rejuvenating nations and would save an exhausted Europe from its decadence. Even so, it was important to make a distinction: only the Mediterranean revolutions would bear fruit. Everything being cooked up north of a line from the Brenner Pass to the Loire could be left to the Teutons. The Italians had shown the way with the march on Rome. The Portuguese had rallied to the banner of Salazar. The Greeks were marching behind Metaxás, the Turks behind Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. And at last the Spaniards were waking from a nightmare: last 18 July, their generals had crossed the Rubicon. What was holding France back from adding its voice to history?

  Jean did not know how to answer this question. He nevertheless possessed enough common sense not to want to be shot down for parroting his father’s solution. Having encountered authoritarian ideas in troubled times, he had also been impressed, without being able to see very clearly where the flaw in the argument lay. It was obvious that Ernst’s Nazism and Stefano’s Fascism had little in common, except that both appealed to an instinct for revenge among populations that had been bled white by the last war. People’s thinking would evolve in time.

  Stefano was getting carried away. He was now speaking only Italian, and Jean was surprised to understand him so well, trying to remember who Joseph had quoted when he said, ‘The Italians are the French in a good mood.’ Oh yes, Cocteau. He smiled to himself, and Stefano, seeing his expression, stopped talking and said, ‘You makin’ fun of me?’

  ‘No, I was just thinking about something a French writer once said.’

  ‘Oh? What was dat?’

  ‘That the Italians are the French in a good mood.’

  ‘Yes, dere eez a lot of truth in what Cocteau sez.’

  Jean raised an enquiring eyebrow. It was clear that driving was not a profession of ignoramuses. First Salah, and now an Italian trucker quoting a French writer whom Jean himself scarcely knew.


  ‘How do you know Cocteau?’

  ‘Oh, you know.’

  Trying to look modest Stefano poured himself a second large glass of grappa with a steady hand, grasping the the neck of the carafe with calm strength. Jean had discreetly emptied his glass into a flowerpot in preparation for his morning training session. He felt ashamed not to be as fit as he had been. What you lost in a few days took weeks, even months, to catch up, if you weren’t a force of nature as Stefano was. Sitting opposite, his shirt open on his hairy chest, his powerful forearms resting on the table, with his enormously thick neck, he was a man who had been brought into the world to stop charging bulls. Yet Jean was allowed a secret smile because Mireille was cheating on that man. In the strongest among us there is always some pitiful weakness, an Achilles heel. An interesting lesson, Jean said to himself as Stefano, finishing his panegyric to Mediterranean Fascism as the sole bulwark against Teutonic heaviness and Slavic lifelessness, stood up without showing a sign of drunkenness, even though he had drunk, on his own, a full half-bottle of grappa. Truckers were the lion-hearted knights of modern times. At the wheel of their trucks they thundered across nations, imposed their own laws of the road, aided the poor (Jean), mocked the rich in their sports cars, flouted customs inspections and, when they stopped, jumped into bed with creatures they whipped into such a state of passion that at dawn they left them panting on unmade beds in rooms that reeked of the heavy smells of diesel and axle grease. Signs indicated their secret trysts, little restaurants where waitresses tucked these weary giants up in their beds; and when they woke, day or night, they set off again across the highways of Europe, passing each other with deafening greetings. Occasionally one of them, imprisoned in his cab like a paladin in his armour, would send up a flare, lighting the nocturnal landscape with a glow that could be seen for many leagues around, summoning other wandering knights to him. What a magnificent life!

  Jean admired Stefano even more when he could hear through the thin floor, from his camp bed in the pantry, the strange warbling sounds that the driver was drawing from Mireille. Nothing like the noises that he, Jean, elicited from the patronne. He had the impression that a wild, animal force was crushing and transfixing Mireille. Stefano handled his instrument like a virtuoso. When the performance ceased, a loud snoring ensued, and Jean imagined Mireille naked, exhausted, unable to sleep, staring wide-eyed into the darkness of her bedroom. What was she thinking about, as sleepless as he was? Jean called to mind the wonderful sequence of pleasures he had had in a single night with Antoinette, the shiver that ran through her all the way to her lips, her thighs suddenly as hard as wood, her eyes filled with tears, half-open to gaze at the inquiring face above her. Love took so many forms that one could not always recognise it. Why did Chantal de Malemort, when, alone in the night, he imagined her (because one day it would happen, he felt an absolute certainty), why did Chantal leave unanswered the same question asked of her?

  Stefano left the next day, and the prefect telephoned. He sent a car to pick Mireille up and bring her to join him at a chalet near Peïra-Cava. Jean found himself alone and began a long letter to Joseph Outen.

  First of all, one very important thing to say, dear Joseph: I’m not jealous. If I were, I’d really have something to think about. The patronne also sleeps with the whole world. It’s given me a bit of rest for the last three nights and I’ve got back all my lost press-ups: 180, then 190, and then 200 this morning. I’m getting fit faster than I expected, and at the same time I’m thinking. I’ve bought myself a notebook where I’ve started making a few notes:

  a) Duplicity: absolutely necessary for a life without dramas. You have to harden your heart. I need to be capable, without blushing to my roots, of sleeping with a woman and then being a jolly decent chap to her lover or her husband. This is essential. Without it society would be impossible.

  b) Physical love is something you learn. I know nothing. Antoinette gave me one key, Mireille is offering me another. There’s a world between them, even though both of them are nymphomaniacs. It’s quite likely that every bit of totty’s a different case. Absolutely imperative to vary my experiences. Sadly, for the moment there’s no prospect of that! But I still have a lot to learn from Mireille.

  c) I shan’t go to university, or to a technical school. I want to earn my living straight away. My parents are old and apparently in difficult circumstances. It’s time I helped them.

  That’s it for today. I’ll keep you informed about my thoughts. Thanks for the books. This time you weren’t pulling my leg. I’ve started Journey to the End of the Night. It’s marvellous. We’re nothing compared to a man like Céline. I’m learning what misery is from a book. It will help me to recognise it and to put up with it when I encounter it in my life.

  Greetings and brotherhood,

  Jean the baker’s boy

  Mireille returned from Peïra-Cava with passion oozing from every pore, and Jean was expected to rise to the challenge. After her short immersion in republican-masonic polite society she had become a little snobbish, and in order not to have to sleep with a scrubber of pans she promoted Jean to waiter. He learnt how to serve dishes, change plates, take customers’ orders. The waitresses, three girls from Menton, giggled at him behind his back. He wrote in his notebook:

  d) What a despicable lot domestic staff are. They really are the bottom of society’s barrel. With one exception: Salah. But he’s not a real servant. He has the manners and character of a lord. First prize for ignominiousness goes to that seedy Baptiste, the one in Chelsea who used to talk to me in the third person. In joint first place with the doorman at the Adler in Rome. The ancients were wise men: no free man was a servant. For all demeaning tasks they had slaves. When it abolished slavery, modern society started to dig its own grave.

  Mireille, who had been born in a kitchen, knew everything there was to know about restaurant staff, whom she treated with a mixture of such severity, arrogance and pitilessness that she inspired respect. On two or three occasions she almost spoke to Jean the same way. He looked at her in such surprise that she realised her error. She was very fond of her ‘boy’, who filled her with delight and whose very inexperience was refreshing. He seemed tireless and took extreme pleasure in his lessons. He was learning quickly, and well. Yet Jean felt that the ardour he was showing was only lukewarm, because of the thought at the back of his mind: that his sweltering nights were followed by dismal mornings as his fitness routine plummeted. He was down to 120 press-ups now. A disaster. A letter from Joseph contained a warning. He was sliding down the slope of sexual obsession, a distraction that was fatal for a sportsman. At seventeen you couldn’t only think of that, or if you did you’d find yourself with a wife and kid at twenty. Self-control involved more rigorous observance of the rules of procreation. Yet when Mireille was once again absent, Jean realised that, like an addict, he was suffering from withdrawal. He was unable to sleep, reliving in a sort of waking nightmare the crudest scenes of his nights with her and her suppressed fury that had to be quieted ten times before daybreak. She was devouring him. Very soon he would be a human wreck. Abruptly, one afternoon Tomate emerged from his permanent listlessness. The mask of his stare was torn aside, and Jean had the impression that the chef from Marseille was a man like other men.

  ‘Jean, you’re getting on my tits,’ he said. ‘A fine lad like you shouldn’t fall into this trap. Go on, fuck off. Right now. No turning back. Another six months of this and you’ll be a dishrag. Then she’ll throw you onto the street. Fuck off, I tell you.’

  Jean didn’t need to think twice. Tomate’s stare had glazed over again. The chef was returning to his dreams. He was right.

  Mireille was due back that evening. Jean took what was owed him from the till, stuffed his things into a paper bag, and jumped on the bus to Nice, where he spent the night walking up and down the Promenade des Anglais, slumping only for a few moments on a bench from time to time, so afraid was he of the phantasms of insomnia. In the morning he drank several cu
ps of coffee on Place Masséna, bought himself a knapsack and set out for Paris. The first truck dropped him off at Saint-Raphaël. The driver was going on to Saint-Tropez, a cul-de-sac from which Jean would have difficulty picking up a lift to Aix at the end of October.

  I ask the reader’s permission to pause here. You could be forgiven for thinking that we were going to follow, in reverse, the same path as Antoine du Courseau. Given the route of that particular truck, it would have been easy, but stories that pile up too many unhoped-for meetings lose all credibility, for life, as we know so well, is much meaner with its miraculous happenings. So no, Jean will not go to Saint-Tropez and come across another sign saying Chez Antoine, where he will find board and lodging, if not more sensual pleasures. Marie-Dévote is now a wise and moderate woman and Antoine has taken up fishing with a hand-line. Toinette is still too young. At this stage they do not interest us. Let us leave them there, a few kilometres from Saint-Raphaël. What is the good of disturbing their tranquillity? Théo is smoking ‘the’ cigar on the bridge of his ‘yacht’, reviling equally the recent elections that have wrought havoc with salary scales and the paid holidays that will bring penniless peasants flocking to the Côte, whose aspect and multitudes will send the select few tourists who already come here running for cover. Oh yes: this government doesn’t give a damn for the luxury sector! Socialism would like to sacrifice thousands of respectable employees who like rubbing shoulders with high society to hordes of workers in caps and overalls. When he reflects on this, Théo shrugs his shoulders and makes a contemptuous, pitying face. Sometimes he sends a commiserating glance in the direction of Antoine, who in red linen trousers and vest is returning to port at the helm of the old boat whose motor leaves puffs of smoke in its wake. Oh yes, he’s taking it easy. Sure, he has been as good as gold since he came to stay, but because fellows like him don’t vote and don’t care what happens in Paris, France is going under. ‘She’s going under, yes she is. Me, Théo, I’m telling you.’